There is an urban legend about boiling frogs, and it goes like this. If you
put a frog in a pan of cold water and slowly, slowly turn up the heat, the frog
will sit there quite calmly until it boils to death. Creeping cultural change
is like that. It’s hard to spot when you’re living inside it. You can stay very
still while the mood of a society becomes harder and meaner and uglier by
stages, telling yourself that everything is going to be fine as all around you,
the water begins to bubble.

This week I had coffee with a friend who has also just come back from a
year away – teaching in Spain for her, studying in America for me. For both of
us, coming home has been hard. There are some things I missed that simply
aren’t there anymore. A particular shade of lipstick at Boots. My favourite
zombie show on the BBC. And most of all, a sense of basic tolerance, however
pretended-at, a feeling that there are some ways of talking in public about
people who are not white, or not British, or in any way “other2, which are the
province of far-right hate groups, the Duke of Edinburgh and no one else.

“Is it me,” said my friend, “Or is it just...okay to say things that are
violently racist now? Has that always been okay, and I just didn’t notice till
now?”

No, it hasn’t always been okay, and in fact it’s still not okay – but it is
a normal part of the public conversation, in a way it wasn’t, even a year ago.
Coming back feels like being plunged into that pan of boiling water, struggling
and wondering why on earth everyone else is so calm. It’s not that Britain wasn’t
a racist, parochial place before. But the xenophobic, Islamophobic and, most
obviously, the anti-immigrant rhetoric has ramped up everywhere.

I noticed it from the moment I picked up the free newspapers they hand out
on the plane home – and not just the Daily Mail, which is finally free to be as
fascist today as it was in 1935 when it rooted all-out for Hitler and the
blackshirts. The other free paper, the Independent, was just as concerned that
day with the seemingly unstoppable “tide” of migrants arriving from Calais,
many of them from- shock, horror, surely not – Africa (in fact, over half of
migrants to Europe come from just two Middle Eastern countries).

By the time we touched down I realised how badly all of us were fooled in
May. We made the mistake, all of us, of thinking that UKIP, with 12.6 per cent
of the vote share and just one MP, did not win the general election. But the
rhetoric of the racist, xenophobic fringe has been adopted by the political
mainstream in a way that is no less upsetting for being entirely predictable.

The ultimate victory of fringe groups is not to enter the administration,
but to change its direction, and Ukip has done this with aplomb, playing into a
broader, well-orchestrated European meltdown over migration. Every paper has
led with headlines about the supposed “immigrant crisis”. The prime minister
describes migrants to Europe as a “swarm”, and the foreign secretary goes
further, warning the people of Britain that the thousands of desperate people
drowning in the Mediterranean are “marauding” foreigners who must be prevented
from coming here because they will threaten our “standard of living” and our
“way of life”.

As the bodies stack up in Calais and the death toll mounts in the
Mediterranean, with two thousand migrants drowning this summer alone, ministers
are not softening their language. On the contrary: they are doubling down.
Fortress Europe must protect its borders from the “influx”, the “tide”, the
“flood”. Although new arrivals from nations suffering war, tyranny and climate
change made up just 0.027 per cent of Europe’s population last year, it simply
cannot be allowed to continue, because… because…

Because what Europe needs now, more than anything else, is a common threat.

The behaviour of the British and wider European elite towards migrants is
not simple inhumanity. It is strategic inhumanity. It is weaponised inhumanity
designed to convince populations fracturing under hammer-blows of austerity and
economic chaos that the enemy is out there, that there is an “us” that must be
protected from “them”. There is a reason why David Cameron’s precise suggestion
as to how to deal with the desperate human beings coming across the channel is
“more dogs and fences”. There is a reason that Angela Merkel’s response, in June,
to a demonstration where the bodies of drowned migrants were buried on the
front lawn of the Bundestag was stony silence. All of this has happened before.
All of this, in fact, is precisely what the European Union was established to
prevent.

Fascism happens when a culture fracturing along social lines is encouraged
to unite against a perceived external threat. It’s the terrifying “not us” that
gives the false impression that there is an “us” to defend.

Living standards have certainly gone down across the eurozone, but that has
very little to do with immigration. The chosen minority must summon the fears
of every social class at once. That’s why migrants, the bogeyman of choice, are
presented as a paradox, just as the Jews were in the 1930s.

Nobody can quite decide whether migrants are a problem because they work so
hard that they’re taking all the jobs (the biggest fear of a working class
pummelled by unemployment and falling wages) or because they’re too lazy to
work so they’re taking all the benefit money (the biggest fear of a middle
class suffering with rising rents and cuts to social services);

It cannot be both at once, and in fact it isn’t – but it’s important that
the paradox is maintained nonetheless. That’s why the Migration Advisory
Council is imposing new, stricter controls on “skilled migrants” entering the
country even as it cracks down on an already miserly state support system for
asylum seekers.

I don’t know at what point in the past decade the word “asylum seeker”
became synonymous with “criminal” in popular conversation, but on that day, the
continent of Europe became a meaner, cheaper place.

Human decency, however, has been factored out of the equation – on purpose.
Britain and the rest of Europe have deliberately been whipped up into a state
of panic over migration, and when people are panicking, they don’t really
listen to reason. No amount of reassuring statistics – for instance, that the
number of refugees in Britain is not only low, but falling – is going to help
when you have the Daily Mail drawing cartoons peopled with racist caricatures
where drowned “illegals” are trying to jump the fence into heaven ahead of
recently-deceased national treasures and a culture where this is considered
publishable in the daily news. This is a debate that tore loose from the facts
a long time ago.

So perhaps we should take a different approach. Perhaps those of us lucky
enough to be European citizens should take a deep breath and realise that
maybe, just maybe, our feelings might not be the most important thing here.
That maybe if thousands of people are desperate enough to risk death to come to
our shores, whether or not we’re entirely comfortable having them move to our
area should not be the deciding factor in policymaking.

The liberal press is as guilty of this as anyone. Notionally more
compassionate news outlets take care to remind us that immigrants actually
“enrich” our culture and bring economic benefits. The fact that this is
entirely true does not make it any less of an offensive argument. Migrants do
not come to the west from war-torn Syria, Eritrea, Afghanistan or any other
nation that has been colonised and occupied and then bombed and plundered for
resources over centuries of imperial and post-imperial exploitation chiefly to
enrich the lives of westerners and liven up our god-awful cuisine with some
actual flavour. They come out of fear for their lives. They come for asylum and
security and opportunity, and they are perfectly entitled to do so, if not by
the law of the land then by the principles of justice and human decency.

The greatest threat to our “way of life” is not migration. Migration does
change society, although far less so than, for example, technology, economic
austerity, escalating inequality, globalisation or climate change. But the
greatest threat to our “way of life”, if there has ever been such a thing on
this vast and varied continent, is not that someday you or I might be sitting
on a bus and hear someone speaking Pashto or Tigrinya. The threat is that we
will swallow the public narrative that immigrants, people from non-European
countries are less human than the rest of us, that they think and feel less,
that they matter less. Europeans are quite capable of sitting calmly in the
bubbling water of cultural bigotry until it boils away every shred of
compassion we have left. That’s the real threat to our “way of life”.

"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs